Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘That is for his father to decide,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor quietly.

‘He is too young anyway.’

‘That also is for his father to decide,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘Anyway, I’m not dying yet.’

‘But you certainly sound determined to die,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘This time every year we go through the same stupid kind of talk.’

‘Of course I am determined to die,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘How else can I go through my rebirths and finally end them?’ Looking down at her hands she said, ‘Do you want to be immortal? I can imagine nothing worse than to be immortal, nothing worse.’

Less than a week after her letter from her younger son, Mrs Rupa Mehra received a letter from her elder son. It was, as always, illegible — and illegible to the extent that it seemed almost to amount to contempt for any possible reader. The news it contained was important, however; and it did no good to Mrs Rupa Mehra’s high blood pressure as she tried desperately to decipher bits of it through a forest of random curves and spikes.

The surprising news related mainly to the Chatterji children. Of the two women, Meenakshi and Kakoli, one had lost a foetus and the other had gained a fiancé. Dipankar had returned from the Pul Mela still uncertain, ‘but at a higher level’. Young Tapan had written rather an unhappy but unspecific letter home — typical adolescent blues, according to Arun. And Amit had let it drop when he had called around one evening for a drink that he was rather fond of Lata, which, given his extreme reticence, could only mean that he was ‘interested’ in her. Making sense of the next few squiggles, Mrs Rupa Mehra was shocked to understand that Arun did not think this was such a bad idea. Certainly, according to him, it would take Lata out of the orbit of the entirely unsuitable Haresh. When the idea was put before Varun, he had frowned and said, ‘I’m studying,’ as if his sister’s future mattered not at all to him. But then, Varun was becoming moodier and moodier since his IAS preparations had restrained his Shamshuing. He had behaved most oddly over Daddy’s shraadh, attempting to turn the Sunny Park house into a restaurant for fat priests, and even asking them (Meenakshi had overheard him) if shraadh could be performed for a suicide.

With a few remarks about the impending General Elections in England (‘At Bentsen Pryce we consider it Hobson’s choice: Attlee is puerile and Churchill senile’) but none about the Indian elections, with a casual admonition to Mrs Rupa Mehra to mind her blood sugar, and to give his love to his sisters, and to assure everyone that Meenakshi was fine and had suffered no lasting harm, Arun signed off.

Mrs Rupa Mehra sat stunned, her heart beating dangerously fast. She was used to rereading her letters a dozen times, examining for days from every possible angle some remark that someone had made to someone else about something that someone had thought that someone had almost done. So much news — and all so sudden and substantial — was too much to absorb at once. Meenakshi’s miscarriage, the Kakoli-Hans nexus, the threat of Amit, the non-mention of Haresh except in an unfavourable passing remark, the disturbing attitude of Varun — Mrs Rupa Mehra did not know whether to laugh or to weep, and immediately asked for a glass of nimbu pani.

And there was no news of her darling Aparna. Presumably she was all right. Mrs Rupa Mehra recalled a remark of hers, now family lore: ‘If another baby comes into this house, I will throw it straight into the waste-paper basket.’ Precocity appeared to be the fashion among children these days. She hoped that Uma would be as lovable as Aparna, but less trenchant.

Mrs Rupa Mehra was dying to show Savita her brother’s letter, but then decided that it would be far better to break the various bits of news to her one by one. It would be less disturbing to Savita, and more informative for herself. Without knowing either Arun’s strong opinions or Varun’s apparent indifference, where would Savita’s own judgement in the matter of Amit lie? So! thought Mrs Rupa Mehra grimly: this must have been behind his gift to Lata of his incomprehensible book of poems.

As for Lata — she had been taking an unnecessary interest in poetry these days, even attending an occasional meeting of the Brahmpur Literary Society. This did not bode well. It was true that she had also been writing to Haresh, but Mrs Rupa Mehra was not privy to the contents of those letters. Lata had become cruelly possessive of her privacy. ‘Am I your mother or not?’ Mrs Rupa Mehra had asked her once. ‘Oh, Ma, please!’ had been Lata’s heartless reply.

And poor Meenakshi! thought Mrs Rupa Mehra. She must write to her at once. She felt that a creamy cambric was called for, and, her eyes moist with sympathy, she went to get the writing paper from her bag. Meenakshi the cold-hearted medal-melter was replaced for a while with the image of Meenakshi the vulnerable, tender, broken vehicle for Mrs Rupa Mehra’s third grandchild, who she felt was bound to have been a boy.

If Mrs Rupa Mehra had known the truth about Meenakshi’s pregnancy or her miscarriage, she would doubtless have been less than sympathetic. Meenakshi, terrified that her baby might not be Arun’s — and, in milder counterpoint, concerned by what a second pregnancy would do to her figure and social life — had decided to take immediate action. After her doctor — the miracle-working Dr Evans — had refused to help her, she went for advice to her closest friends among the Shady Ladies, swearing them first to secrecy. She was certain that if Arun heard about her attempt to free herself from this unwanted child, he would be as unreasonably angry as he had been when she had liberated herself from one of his father’s medals.

How unfortunate, she thought desperately, that neither the jewellery theft nor Khandelwal’s dogs had shocked her foetus out of her.

Meenakshi had made herself quite sick with abortifacients, worry, conflicting advice and tortuous gymnastics when one afternoon, to her relief, she had the miscarriage of her dreams. She phoned Billy immediately, her voice unsteady on the line; when he asked anxiously if she was all right, she was able to reassure him. It had been sudden and painless, if alarming and, well, horribly messy. Billy sounded miserable for her sake.

And Arun, for his part, was so tender and protective of her for days afterwards that she began to feel that there might be at least something to be said for the whole sorry business.

Had wishes been horses, Mrs Rupa Mehra would have been riding at this very moment on the Calcutta Mail, and would soon have been questioning everyone she knew in Calcutta and Prahapore about all they had been doing or thinking or planning or professing. But, quite apart from the cost of the journey, there were compelling reasons for her to remain in Brahmpur. For one thing, baby Uma was still very little, and needed a grandmother’s care. Whereas Meenakshi had been by turns possessive of Aparna and perfectly happy to ignore her (treating her mother-in-law as a kind of super-ayah while she traipsed about Calcutta, socializing), Savita shared Uma with Mrs Rupa Mehra (and with Mrs Mahesh Kapoor when she visited) in a natural, daughterly way.

Secondly — and as if there had not been drama enough in the letter she had received from Arun — this evening was the performance of Twelfth Night. It was to be held in the university auditorium immediately after the Annual Day ceremonies and tea, and her own Lata would be in it — as would Malati, who was just like a daughter to her. (Mrs Rupa Mehra was well disposed towards Malati these days, seeing in her a chaperone rather than a conniver.) So would that boy K; but thank God, thought Mrs Rupa Mehra, there would be no more rehearsals. And with the university break for Dussehra in just a couple of days, there would be no great possibility of chance meetings on campus either. Mrs Rupa Mehra felt, however, that she must remain in Brahmpur just in case. Only when, for the short Christmas vacation, the whole family — Pran, Savita, Lata, Lady Baby and materfamilias — visited Calcutta would she desert her reconnaissance post.